CES 2009: Touring EA's Home

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Stepping into EA's casual-friendly digs inside Sony's avatar arena.

By Levi Buchanan

Nestled in Sony's giant CES booth, Electronic Arts is giving showgoers a glimpse through the front door of their new EA Sports-branded Home base. EA Sports Senior Producer Robert Burnett sat down with us this afternoon to show off the almost-done real estate that will house a brand new casual-tilting (but not hardcore-neglecting) experience. According to Burnett, EA has been at work on the EA Sports Home area for approximately six months, but an idea for something like this has been kicking around for a decade.

The EA Sports Home area will initially host three sports: golf, poker, and racing. But each sport is hardly presented in the hardcore manner of a full EA Sports release. Instead, visiting each sport's area introduces you to a very casual take on the game. For example, the racing section of EA Sport's Home will remind a lot of gamers of the classic Micromachines. The cars are pretty small but the track is wide. The goal is to foster competition, but not to frustrate new players. Too great of a challenge will only turn off a casual gamer, but that's not to say the experience is totally casual. According to Burnett, a seasoned player can sit there and figure out the best race lines through each track and really rack up points.

Points earned while playing the different games in Home are used not just for bragging rights -- although there will be leaderboards as part of the overall community experience -- but also to purchase items and upgrades you can use in the games or with your avatar. "You'll see something that looks really cool and you'll come back to play the game to get it," says Burnett. The racing area's shop is called the Boost Shop, for example. As you might guess by the name, inside you will find a variety of pieces and parts to power-up your matchbox ride. Burnett thinks this point system will really help build a community and, according to him, "make this a destination people will come back to on a regular basis."

Burnett also stressed the desire to build a seamless, singular place for EA Sports gamers. The Home area will feature not just games, but a variety of content. "The EA Sports label creates a huge amount of video content every week," Burnett notes. But much of it exists online and is mainly available via the PC. Manuals or marketing info points consumers away from their consoles and to a website. "This gives us an opportunity to bring that content directly to the user in their living room, on their console."

EA Sports' Home base at Sony's CES booth.

Another benefit of having an EA Sports area in Home with evolving content is a desire to step outside the traditional model of videogame development and sales. Teams spend 12 to 20 months creating a game that has about a month of shelf life before it is shuffled back in favor of newer product. The development team then goes on to do something else. "This is really an opportunity for community teams, marketing, and development teams to stay in contact with the community on a daily and weekly basis," says Burnett. And thus an ecosystem (of sorts) is born.

The ecosystem is already poised to grow, too. Before the demo ends, Burnett stepped to the edge of a terrace in the EA Sports area and showed off a soccer stadium and a basketball court under construction. It's an interesting hook. Players see that new stuff is actually being built, giving them another incentive to keep coming back to check when new areas are open and ready for play.

When EA Sports opens its doors in Home this Spring, the worlds of hardcore and casual will inch closer once more. It will be fascinating to see which side of the divide embraces it first.